Literature Is Good: Alicia Byrne Keane's “Natural State”
Occasionally, a member of the Boulevard staff wishes to celebrate particular aspects of a piece we’ve published and share their reflections with our readers, in hopes of giving some insight into our editorial considerations when selecting new work. We are calling this feature “Literature Is Good.”
by Haley Harris, Editorial Assistant
Alicia Byrne Keane’s “Natural State” (Boulevard Vol. 37, p 83), is an intricately-crafted sonic universe, a patchwork that seamlessly and associatively links potent images and personal locales from the speaker’s life across time. Within a single stanza, the poem is a self-contained yet expansive unit of memory strung together by a sensory wash and a familiar longing. The opening vignette is one of lushness and abundance—a seemingly rural setting with a “white glow” at dusk, a “waxed yellow cloth” imprinted by the condensation of small glasses. Cultivating the cadence of childhood, the “sound of adults” sitting at long tables reverberates down the hill from where the speaker is situated. In the secluded environment of youth, this is a well-traversed landscape known distinctly in the knowledge of sharp slate in nearby riverbeds and spoken of closely in the familiar language or “code” between the speaker and a close other, perhaps a friend from early years. The potency of memory in this opening scene is saturated with the watchful noticings and mishaps of a child—“horses’ fetlocks” and “dripped russett blood” after the “slip of reins through undergrowth.” The landscape is one of beauty, surely, but of perils, too.
Transporting the reader from this early vignette into a realm of retrospect and longing, a transitional line in the middle of the poem reads, suddenly, “I would love to see this building from without/ again, even that.” A loss has occurred—perhaps as a product of time passing, of growing older. A commonplace landmark, “this building,” anonymous yet acquainted, is the image that transitions the poem from a rooted domain of intimate knowledge to an untethered, fleeting domain, captured in mere “photographs/ on a website somewhere.” In these photographs there is pronounced tension between the warmth of “sunlight held in rectangles on dark wood,” and the flattened, manicured quality of “sheets pulled up over pillows.” The image of crisp bed sheets still lingering, the speaker jumps forward temporally, bringing the reader to a hotel room years later. The air conditioning of the room mimics “the swell of an ocean”—a kind of sensory alchemy available in even ordinary, banal experiences. “Unimportant moments” such as these, it occurs to the speaker, are witnessed by the characters rendered in paintings. Two characters in particular—a “taut leopard” and an image of “Toulouse-Lautrec looking out from under the brim of his small, demonic hat” are voyeurs to the events of the speaker's life over time. They seem to represent a kind of constancy, a fixed gaze, amidst inevitable change—perhaps the speaker’s impulse to locate a self.
In my favorite line of the piece, this poetic self is described as “not exactly dead leaves…more like a window, sun gone helical on moss-covered rocks.” Sensorily tying together several previously mentioned locales in one line, the “sun gone helical” calls to mind the sun-lit rectangles on dark wood in the website photograph, the moss-covered rocks call to mind the locale of the river, or the ocean. The speaker-self, then, can be recognized as a product of experiences and observed details. And in the way that the best poems do, “Natural State” ends with a sense of reverberation and renewal. Some cycle of memory has been completed as the reader returns finally to the image of “the river resettling,” where once the speaker, in youth, traversed with horses. In the acceptance of memory’s sweep, and in the flow-like integration of seemingly discordant details and longings acquired over the course of a life, the poem achieves a change in consciousness.